As I said, when you have some factual material that is not US Government/collaborator fugitive Cold War propaganda BS, get back to me with it. Otherwise, I'm afraid, it's YOU who are the blowhard.
But I've got a friendly tip for ya - - as long as you're looking for evidence of atrocities, why not prospect in your own backyard? It's a real treasure trove. Try looking up "Guatemala." Or "El Salvador" Or "Chile." Or "Nicaragua." Or "Colombia." Or you can go further afield, for a more exotic flavour. Try "Iran." Try "Operation Phoenix." Geeze, why go all the way back to the Thirties for real atrocities when you've got so many so much nearer in time, blowhard?
BTW, I'd never claim that Uncle Joe would get a perfect report card from the ACLU. Far from it. He governed with a heavy hand, no doubt about it. There are only a few things that piss me off about your knee-jerk anti-communism, apart from your near-total fucking ignorance of the context of the times:
1. The complete ignorance of what was provoking Stalin's repression, factors such as hostile foreign powers (Britain, France, Poland, the Czech Legion and even the U.S. and Canadian armies had invaded Russia during the Russian Civil War and some -- particularly the Poles - - had committed horrific atrocities there,) the challenge of Trotskyism on the left and subversion by foreign agents on the right, and the rising menace of Germany. What's particularly hilarious is your claim that (and I'm paraphrasing here, not literally quoting) that "Well, none of the material I've been reading mentions any of this stuff." OF COURSE IT DOESN'T, DUMMY. That's because the only stuff you can dig up is recycled Cold War propaganda, either from the US Government itself, or the British (Robert Conquest, the mainstay of your beloved gendercide web-site, was a British Army intelligence officer in WWII, then a Foreign Service diplomat in charge of anti-communist liaison activities in Eastern Europe in the post-War forties and early fifties.
2. The total absurdity of the claim that the Ukrainian famine resulted from the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, rather than hoarding by kulaks. One or both of your bullshit articles portrayed the kulaks as simple peasants and tried to minimize the differences between them and the other rural land-workers. Simple they might have been, but in Marxist terms, they were in a whole different class, with different class interests. They were small land-holders, the vast majority of the land-workers were landless peasants, for whom collectivization for the first time in history, gave them a stake in the land itself. The resentment of the kulaks towards collectivization was accurately reported insofar as it covered the kulaks themselves, but it was ridiculous that it represented any kind of majoritarian feeling amongst the peasant class as a whole. Kulak resistance to collectivization, sabotage of the kolkhoz (collective farm) and most of all hoarding (which may well have spread to the newly collectivized peasants, although Soviet sources deny it) were major factors in the famine. There were many cases of commissars sent out from the bigger towns and cities and largely ignorant of peasant life, who were simply murdered for their efforts to collect the produce in the name of the state, for later distribution to ALL workers of the state, including the urban proletariat. Common sense alone would tell you that no dictator, no matter how brutal, would deliberately slaughter millions of his own subjects who labour was needed both in agriculture and in the new industrial projects which were then springing up all over the country, typically in the form of steel mills.
3. A lot of anticommunism is simply anti-semitism, especially in Europe. So, to put this as simply as possible, Fuck 'em. Why the fuck should I care a rat's ass about an anti-Semite if he gets caught up in one of Stalin's purges? Why should I give a shit if his Nazi bitch of a wife or daughter gets raped and murdered by a Red Army soldier? It's all part of a wider or more cosmic system of karmic justice, where the actual perpetrators of pogroms or Nazi brutalities can't be identified, captured or punished, but cosmic retribution casts a wider net and falls on their families instead. Fuck the whole God-damned bunch a them. Karmic justice is a bitch.
